Virginia Woolf Quotes
-
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.
-
I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.
-
...she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.
-
Among the tortures and devestations of life is this then - our friends are not able to finish their stories.
-
She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.
-
Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
-
The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.
-
I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.
-
Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.
-
A perfect treat must include a trip to a second-hand bookshop.
-
For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him.
-
Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?
-
A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.
-
It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
-
A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.
-
For love... has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together.
-
Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
-
Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.
-
I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.
-
For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said.
-
The artist after all is a solitary being.
-
But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.
-
What is a woman? I assure you, I do not know ... I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.
-
This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.